March 1907.] 



177 



Miscellaneous. 



Now we have come to the final and proper stage,— the farm roust then be 

 a laboratory. Thus primarily it must be a laboratory enterprise, and the pattern 

 and model idea are only incidental and secondary. If your people do not believe 

 in this idea, then you must educate your people, A college farm is not primarily 

 for the purpose of growing model or perfect crops. 1 should rather have the oppor- 

 tunity to teach one student by means of a farm than to show one hundred persons 

 a field of perfect pumpkins. 



If Ave study plowing in the class room, we must also study it in the field, 

 even if we destroy a crop. We must determine and test the relation of plowing to 

 moisture, aeration* microbic life, and many other questions. It is more important 

 that a man learn how and why to plow than it is for the college farm to grow a crop of 

 wheat. Even if I tore up the drainage on a farm in order to teach it, I wont be able 

 to do it. The botanist pulls up the plant to study it. In learning how to grow potatoes 

 one should pull them up to study the root system. Not long ago I was asked how deep 

 potatoes should be planted in a certain soil. I asked, "How many of you know whether 

 the tubers form above or below the feeding roots." Pour or five guessed, but no 

 one knew. But on that fact depends much of the success in planting potatoes. 

 If your students want to see a model orchard, they liave a thousand of them in 

 California. We waut such an establishment as will allow us to drive our cattle 

 right into the class-room. We are this day building a class-room at Cornell which 

 will hold stock, and which has seats for the students on the sides. They will study 

 real live cattle, not pictures and models. The young men study those cows and 

 find out why they are good and bad cows. They examine their conformation, etc. 

 These cows are just as much laboratory material as the plants of the botanist or 

 the chemicals of the chemist. Next week, if we should study the question of beef 

 cattle, they are brought into the building and the students study them just the 

 same way your students study stratification of rocks. Ten acres of land to use 

 when I want it, and as I want it, is worth more pedagogically than a thousand 

 acres to look at. 



The value of a university farm from a university man's point of view 

 consists in its usefulness as a means of teaching. If you do not want to call it a 

 farm, call it land. The better it is as a farm, the better it ought also to be as a 

 laboratory ; but the laboratory utilization of it should always come first. If you 

 are not using farms as a means of training men you are not using them for 

 university purposes. A director of an agricultural college said some years ago 

 when a visitor complained that he didn't consider the college farm to be a model 

 farm, " I would rather have a good man with a flower pot in a window than have 

 a poor man with a thousand acres of land." A university farm justified from the 

 university or pedagogical point of view must be made a true laboratory to collate 

 and articulate with the theoretical instruction, otherwise the future will not 

 justify your possession of it.— C 'alifornia Agricultural Experimental Station 

 Circular, 



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